Handmade Robot Brings Stop Motion To Life

Stop motion animation is often called a lost art, as doing it (or at least, doing it well) is incredibly difficult and time consuming. Every detail on the screen, no matter how minute, has to be placed by human hands hundreds of times so that it looks smooth when played back at normal speed. The unique look of stop motion is desirable enough that it still does get produced, but it’s far less common than hand drawn or even computer animation.

If you ever wanted to know just how much work goes into producing even a few minutes of stop motion animation, look no farther than the fascinating work of [Special Krio]. He not only documented the incredible attention to detail required to produce high quality animation with this method, but also the creation of his custom robotic character.

Characters in stop motion animation often have multiple interchangeable heads to enable switching between different expressions. But with his robotic character, [Special Krio] only has to worry about the environments, and allow his mechanized star do the “acting”. This saves time, which can be used for things such as making 45 individual resin “drops” to animate pouring a cup of tea (seriously, go look).

To build his character, [Special Krio] first modeled her out of terracotta to get the exact look he wanted. He then used a DIY 3D laser scanner to create a digital model, which in turn he used to help design internal structures and components which he 3D printed on an Ultimaker. The terracotta original was used once again when it was time to make molds for the character’s skin, which was done with RTV rubber. Then it was just the small matter of painting all the details and making her clothes. All told, the few minutes of video after the break took years to produce.

When I was a kid I made a number of 8mm animated movies in various styles, although I have no artistic talent. But when you are a kid and it’s summer, you have nothing but time. The excitement of waiting a week for the film to return and see how it turned out is still visceral to me.

I’m glad that there are people with far more talent and patience than me who still do it.

Robot or puppet I believe that both terms could work. Of course there is no artificial intelligence on it. The making approach of the puppet (expecially for the head) is close to robot used in special effects. If you do in a bigger scale and control the movement via stepper motors or servos it becomes an animatronic robot (always driven by an human and not autonomously).
Anyway call it puppet and we all are fiiiiiiine! ;)

Ahaha yep the style is in the edge! But is made on purpose. I do illustration and graffiti and I just wanted to give life on my character. If you are courious about the style and you want to see other my works (not animation) please visit: http://www.specialkrio.com